Scalable and Energy-Efficient Multimedia Content Sharing over New Generation Computing and Communication Platforms

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In the past decade, we have witnessed the fast evolution toward a new generation of social, mobile and cloud computing for networked multimedia processing and sharing. Today, high-definition videos and even 3D/multiview videos can be readily captured and browsed by personal computing devices, and conveniently processed and stored with remote cloud resources. The users are now actively engaged to be part of a social ecosystem, rather than passively receiving media content. The revolution is being driven further by the deep penetration of 3G/4G wireless networks and smart mobile devices that are seamlessly integrated with online social networking and media sharing services. Despite the increasingly abundant bandwidth and computation resources, the ever increasing data volume of user generated media content and the boundless coverage of socialized sharing have presented unprecedented challenges to both content and network service providers. The highly diversified media content types, origins, distribution channels further impose complex interactions among the different components in a networked sharing system. We thus ask the following critical question: how can the massive media content be efficiently generated and distributed among massive clients with the latest social, mobile, and cloud computing and communication platforms? Besides scalability, energy has become a critical concern with these new generation computation and communication platforms, too. On the mobile terminal side, the highly constrained battery reservoir has long been a bottleneck in service time between recharges; on the cloud side, the datacenters are known to be power-hungry. The computation- and bandwidth-intensive multimedia services that extensively use CPU, GPU, storage, and network resources certainly make the situation worse. Is has been predicted that multimedia energy consumption is rising at 16% per year, accounting for half of the annual operating expenditure of these services. To achieve the ultimate goals of scalable and energy-efficient media sharing for anyone, anytime, and anywhere, technology advances in various aspects need to be re-examined and jointly optimized under a coherent framework. In this proposed long-term research, we will address the above challenges in the latest computing and communication environments. We will focus not only on the optimization of individual components, ranging from media content generation, network and cloud resource allocation, social media propagation, to energy-efficient media computation and communications in cloud and in local devices, but also on their interactions that pose additional problems to designers. A thorough understanding of the modules in this complex system as well as their interactions will facilitate the development of such essential services as social media, IPTV, movie-on-demand, video conferencing, and interactive online gaming in the emerging digital entertainment/business world.We expect six PhD and nine MSc students be trained throughout the 5-year program. These HQPs, together with the technology innovations from our research, will help with maintaining Canada’s lead in the development and deployment of digital and social media services.